With the Syrian Army closing in on the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, a Syrian-American who's family lives in the city tries to understand what the fighting means for the local population, and what will happen next.

This past Friday, President Obama announced a shift in his administration’s immigration policy that changes the lives of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, but the Republican Party is struggling to rally around a unified response.

The physics journal Physical Review A has recently published a paper whose lead author is only 18-years-old. Ari Dyckovsky recently graduated from high-school, but his recent work on quantum entanglement may set the stage for the next generation of quantum computers.

Rio De Janaeiro had finally closed the infamous Jardim Gramacho garbage dump. Lucy Walker, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Waste Land," weighs the environment good against the economic consequences for the people who once worked there. 

Is zero traffic fatalities a utopian pipe dream? Chicago’s transportation commissioner Gabe Klein explains why he thinks otherwise. He lays out the city's new initiative to eliminate all traffic fatalities within ten years.

Yesterday, The Takeaway spoke with Kaylin Andres, a 23-year-old diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer who uses comedy as her coping mechanism. And the conversation led to more questions: How have others used comedy and laughter to get through tough times?

A world-class mountaineer explains why the deadly accident on Mount Everest this past weekend was inevitable, but also preventable, and lays out the combination of factors – both physical and psychological – that all too often lead to tragedy.

How much are Facebook ads — and by extension, Facebook itself — really worth? To find out, The Takeaway speaks with Ralph Folz, CEO of Wordstream, a Boston-based software company in the search marketing space, and pitting Facebook's ad model in a cage match against the raining heavy-weight advertising champion, Google.

It’s hard to imagine the Senate without the filibuster, but now the non-profit group Common Cause is filing a lawsuit against the Supreme Court claiming that the notorious senate procedure is, in fact, unconstitutional. The Takeaway talks with the plaintiff’s attorney Emmet Bondurant and filibuster scholar Gregory Koger to find out where the filibuster came from, what good it’s done us, and whether it’s going to stick around.        

President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage on Wednesday in an interview with ABC News, ending speculation following Vice President Biden's seemingly off-hand remarks in support of gay marriage rights earlier this week. The endorsement also comes one day after the passage in North Carolina of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and raises, at least for the moment, a controversial social issue in a campaign season that has largely been focused on the economy.

How do you compare the wealth of nations? An economics professor at Princeton University thinks such a big question has a bite-sized answer: buy a Big Mac. Orley Ashenfelter is the author of the Big Mac Index, which measures a country's wealth based on a McDonalds worker's average wage and the cost of a Big Mac.

Police in Saudi Arabia have announced that Shaima Jastaniah, the Saudi woman sentenced to ten lashes for driving last summer, has been offered a reprieve. Explaining the decision and its context is Eman Al Nafjan.  She's a proponent of the women’s driving movement and the author of Saudiwoman’s Weblog.

Newt Gringich has announced that he he will be dropping out the Republican Primary. We talk with Republican strategist Ron Christie to figure out how Newt has affected both Romney and Obama's chances in the general election, and the tradition of the meteoric candidate in American politics.       

Walmart’s bribery scandal may be rocking the halls of the Bentonville-based retailer, but what about the streets of Bentonville itself? The Takeaway finds out what local people think about the Walmart’s latest woes.    

Last week, the commentariat pounced on Obama's light-weight summer reading list, but what would they make of his doodles?  Yes, doodles, those absent-minded sketches found in the margins of the White House stationary.  A reading list, after all, is a highly calculated, self-conscious act of political semiotics, but a doodle ... truly, what better window could there be into the unguarded presidential id?

Despite their bad reputation, it’s hard to imagine an internet without cookies. The small, suspicious looking files sitting in the bowels of your browser are what allow you to have a shopping cart when visiting Amazon, save your passwords on frequently visited websites and receive the kind of targeted advertising that helps underwrite much of the internet’s free content. Handled responsibly, cookies can be useful tools that respect your anonymity while offering you great services. And if you really don’t like them, well, that’s what your browser’s privacy settings are for.

It would appear that The Wall Street Journal isn’t the only news organization that's struggling with how to revise web content after getting its facts wrong.  Reuters recently suffered an embarrassment when, after publicly acknowledging a serious error in a column by David Johnston, they deleted the original URL altogether.

This May, we weighed the merits of Apple's curated app store against the Android's big tent model, and what each meant for the future of free speech, but David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards, suspects that this dichotomy might be a moot point.  Instead, he offers a third option that has been hiding in plain sight.

In The Future of Gaming, which aired on our show last week, Jesse Schell envisioned a world in which governments and corporations would reward you with points for performing certain tasks. In game design circles, this kind of point system is an example of what’s called a game dynamic.  Game dynamics can come in many different forms, but basically it’s just a fancy name for any mechanism that makes sure people keep playing the game.  (If you’re a video game company, you may even maintain a secret playbook which lists all of the game dynamics you use to keep people clicking.)

But game designer Seth Priebatsch points out that we don’t need to wait for some hypothetical future to see game dynamics put to use in the real world.  They’re actually all around us.  We just don’t realize they’re there, and, as a result, we aren’t using them very well.  What you call happy hour, he calls the appointment dynamic, because you’re rewarded for showing up at a certain time and place.  At a TEDx conference last year in Boston, he talked about some other game dynamics that we’ve been taking for granted, and suggested how they might be used for something other than cheap beer.